The present invention arose in the particular context of vendors for bottles and/or cans of beverages such as soft drinks and, while it is disclosed herein primarily in relation to that context, it should be clearly understood that the principles of the invention have broader applicability and may be used with other articles having sufficiently similar dynamics, as will be appreciated by those skilled in the article vendor art.
Of the several types of mechanized article-vendors which have been devised, one which is in particularly widespread use, especially for vending rollable generally cylindrical bottles and/or cans of beverages such as soft drinks is the so-called column vendor.
In a rudimentary or architypical form a conventional column vendor comprises an enclosure, often called a cabinet or box, having a principal face, generally its front, which usually features in a lower region at least one outlet port for vended articles, a control panel which generally includes at least one site where the intending user may insert some form of credit or payment such as coins, a sheet of paper money or a credit card, at least one selector usable for selecting among two or more different brands, flavors, sizes or other characteristics of the articles available for vending, and one actuator (which may be combined with the selector) for initiating operation of the vendor to vend a selected article for which a form of payment has been inserted. Often the control panel as well as other panels on the principal face, and other faces of the column vendor bear logos or other indicia indicative of and/or tending to promote the selection of one or more of the brands and/or flavors of articles usually contained in the vendor. Any of a whole host of other features may be provided on the prinicpal face of the box, including without limitation change-making devices, slug-bent coin rejectors, light and/or sound emitting sales-promotional devices and the like.
Within the cabinet of such a typical column vendor are a plurality of vertical columns generally in one rank which extends transversally of the principal face, but sometimes two or more ranks deep front-to-back. At a minimum, each column includes wall means for confining and supporting a stack of articles, means for permitting articles to the stack, and means operatively connected between a mechanical, electro-mechanical or fully electronic `brain` housed in the cabinet, and an outlet port for abstracting an article from the stack and supplying it to the outlet port upon receipt of a signal which in effect indicates that an intending user has inserted a sufficient payment, has selected an article contained in that column and has requested actuation of the vendor to furnish such an article to the outlet port.
In the typical column vendor, at least for beverages, the space within the cabinet is refrigerated so that the bottles or cans of beverage, when vended, are cold and ready to provide cool refreshment.
Quite frequently in column vendors, the stack of articles in a column is one-article wide (although there may be zig-zag staggering of the articles in order to maximise use of space in the cabinet) and the stack is supported from below by a conventional arrangement which includes a device to temporarily transfer the site of application of stack support to the next-to-lowest article as the lowest article is vended to the outlet port, e.g. by rotation of a cradle portion of a principal support, after which the application of stack support is retransferred to the principal support permitting the stack to correspondingly lower.
The vendor cabinet has a lockable door through which access may be gained to the cabinet interior only by authorized maintaince and service personnel, e.g. for making repairs and adjustments, collecting accumulated forms of payment and refilling the columns with articles to be vended. Often, the principal face of the vendor is provided on that door or at least on the same side of the vendor as is that door. And usually, the individual columns are designed to be refilled from the front, or from the top by starting from the existing lowermost article (or from the principal support if the particular column is completely empty) and building the stack article by article until the particular stack is full or the service person has exhausted his or her supply of the article belonging in that stack.
Over the years, knowledge and lore has accumulated in the article vending trade as to the relative popularity generally, regionally and locally of various brands and flavors of articles to be vended, for instance, soft drinks. A typical route person who has serviced a particular soft drink vendor for an extended period can forecast with a respectable degree of confidence the ratio of cans of cola to orange soda to lemon-lime soda that will have been vended from that machine since his or her last visit and so be able to load up his or her hand-truck with a corresponding profile of cases of warm soft-drink for refilling the machine. It is a knack born of necessity, since the person who is poor at such forecasting will be found lugging much more merchandise both to and from the delivery truck and having to make more second trips to the delivery truck, both of which act as drags on efficiency.
In order to accomodate some of the disparity in brand/flavor popularity, many different tricks-of-the -trade and machine design features have been devised. Perhaps most rudimentary of these practices, often used on machines where each column has its own stack support cradle and each selector button or position on the vending panel is connected to a distinct stack support cradle, is to fill the stacks for slow-selling brands/flavors only part-way full, but the stacks for fast-selling brands/flavors all of the way full (and often also to devote more than one column to the fast-selling brands/favors). Then, the service person may fill the empty spaces in the respective columns above the stacks of slow-selling brands/flavors (and perhaps other spaces within the refrigerated cabinet) with containers of the faster-selling brands/flavors of product. In this manner an advantage can be gained, since, at the time of the next refilling of the machine the service person can manually transfer already cold containers of the fast-selling brands/flavors from the `wrong` to the `right` columns, after which the remaining column space can be filled with warm containers of product as before. In this manner, a service person can restock the machine with somewhat less frequency than if only the `right` containers were ever placed in the respective columns, and yet be assured that customers will neither find the machine to be `out` of their desired beverage or the like, nor that can or other container when received from the vending machine to contain warm beverage or the like due to insufficient time of residence of the respective container in the vendor cabinet prior to its being vended. Of course, if the vendor was used abnormally frequently, and/or the service person was delayed abnormally long from one visit to the next, the intending user could still find his or her brand/flavor sold out or, what is worse, could deposit his or her money, make a selection, and instead of a container of the selected brand/flavor of product, receive one of the containers that the service person had sandbagged in a `wrong` column in anticipation of his or her next restocking of the machine.
At the vendor designer/manufacturer level, the various equipment modifications that have been deivsed for accomodating disparity of brand/flavor popularity have included (in addition to the aforementioned provision of more than one column and thus more than one selector or selector position devoted to a popular brand/flavor), some other doubling-up or column transfer techniques such as connecting two or more columns to the same selector or selector position on the selector panel in such a manner that containers are vended alternately or in some established pattern of succession from the functionally interconnected columns. Another technique which has been devised is to interconnect two columns at some point above the bottom in such a manner that containers can transfer from one column to an adjacent column as that adjacent column tends to become empty.
In a typical such arrangement of the latter type, one column may be provided at half-height with an elevated floor, and above that floor a `trap-door` leading to an adjoining column, for effectively converting two adjoining columns into a half-column for a less-popular brand/flavor of product and a one-and-one-half column for a more-popular brand/flavor of product. Such arrangements are shown in the following U.S. patents:
______________________________________ Patentee U.S. Pat. No. Issue Date ______________________________________ Donaldson 2,399,105 Apr. 23, 1946 Johnson et al 3,169,621 Feb. 16, 1965 Thompson 3,561,640 Feb. 9, 1971 ______________________________________
Other arrangements for causing a container which is stored in one column to be dispensed from a port which serves another column, e.g. by bodily shifting all or part of that column are shown in the following U.S. patents:
______________________________________ Patentee U.S. Pat. No. Issue Date ______________________________________ Fry 2,205,192 Jun. 18, 1940 Greene et al 2,255,007 Sep. 2, 1941 Salisbury 2,913,142 Nov. 17, 1959 ______________________________________
Quite often the aforementioned prior art vendor structural arrangements were for accomodating space-to-sales were adjustable and/or reversible which is considered to be an attractive feature, inasmuch as it provides a means for being flexible, within a given vending machine, so as to permit the operator to tailor the columns to allot more space to faster-selling items, and less space to slower-selling ones. This need is particularly strong in an age where brand segmentation is producing a proliferation of beverages under the same brand, a growing number of new strongly-promoted beverages e.g. teas, fruit juices, and soft drinks containing some proportion of real fruit juice, and in an age where some changes in ownership of brands may result in unaccustomed realignments of varieties of soft drinks expected to be vended from the same machines. It is also important where the machine over its expected lifetime, is expected to be in service at a succession of locations where different profiles of brand/flavor preference are likely.
The present inventor and his associates have experimented with various configurations of the active `trap-door`-type of column transfer mechanism which has been referred to above, only to find the usefulness of such mechanicsms to be overly limited, in that, if the `trap-door` is not near the top of a column, the weight of the cans or bottles being held back will push out the door and, in essence, both stop downward travel of the principal stack in the principal column and also inhibit transfer of the auxiliary stack to the principal column. More complex active gates provided at lower levels of the columns also have proved to be a disappointment. Although they may eliminate the problem of `fighting` or precedence between the stack in the principal column and the stack in the auxiliary column, when the complex active gate is finally released the sudden cascade of cans or bottles into the principal column causes many complications that have proved difficult to solve.
The present invention was devised in order to provide the advantages of prior art column transfer devices, without the drawbacks which have been described.